It seems to depend on the search engines, but yes, more and more of them ignore the meta information. They find it more valuable to check the actual content of the page, and the more targeted that content on a specific topic, the better it ranks for that topic. So a page on
"Symptoms of West Nile Virus"
would get lots more hits than a page that was just about "summer diseases and their symptoms" and had a bunch of different information.